Getting followers on board can increase the impact of an influencer strategy by up to 400%, according to a new study.
Researchers Hee Mok Park, Minki Kim and Nicholas Lurie compared an ‘influencer + follower seeding strategy’, in which the best influencer-follower pair in a social network is chosen to tweet and retweet a message, to an ‘influencer-only strategy’ for spreading online word of mouth.
The theory was tested using organic data from pop music influencers on X, simulated tweets in lab experiments and a field study using promoted messages.
Researchers found that the seeding strategy outperformed influencer-only approaches in spreading word-of-mouth for brands. In lab experiments, users were more likely to share or engage with promoted tweets when the seeder strategy was used.
The field data showed that followers paid more attention to posts which used an influencer + follower seeding strategy than those which used two influencers. The effect was particularly strong when the most ‘embedded’ followers were selected — meaning those that shared the most followers with the influencer.
The number of followers used to seed the message also has an effect on the outcome: three followers had a stronger effect than four. Larger numbers were not tested, but it is plausible that too many seeded followers could start to make messages seem overplayed or even spammy.
The researchers hypothesised that the reason influencer seeding works is that the social affirmation of seeing another follower responding to the influencer’s post makes them more likely to ascribe value to it.
The influencer seeding is done by contacting one or more of an influencer’s followers, usually by DM, to get them to retweet, repost, or reply to the influencer’s original post. Doing this with select followers enhanced word of mouth, with this strategy ‘increasing retweet probability by up to five times’ and leading to an 80% increase in word-of-mouth diffusion when compared to an influencer-only strategy.
However, the researchers did note that this strategy is only effective in networks where social affirmation is important to word-of-mouth. In networks where this is not the case, influencer-only strategies were found to remain superior. That means that this is likely to be an effective tactic for consumer brands in fashion, music, and lifestyle, but will not have as strong an impact in spaces which prioritise utility or information, like LinkedIn, or which disincentivise retweet-style interactions, like Reddit.
Seeding Social Affirmation: Influencer + Follower Seeding Strategies and the Diffusion of Online Word-of-Mouth by Hee Mok Park, Minki Kim and Nicholas H. Lurie was published in Journal of Marketing on June 25, 2026.